Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto

Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto was published in 2011 by Melville House Publishing, translated by Antony Shugaar and illustrated by Federico Maggioni. The original novel by Gianni Rodari C’era due volte il barone Lamberto was published with Einaudi in 1978. Melville House Publishing is an “independent publisher” in Brooklyn, New York¹⁸⁵ that started from “an art project”.¹⁸⁶ It was founded in 2001 for the purpose of publishing a book about the terrorist attack on 11^th September, and Melville’s booklist ranges from nonfiction books characterised by strong political and social analyses on

184 The review is available online: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-9628720-6-8 (last access 08/09/2015)

185 http://www.mhpbooks.com/about/ (last access 08/09/2015)

186 Stated by one of the founders, Dennis Loy Johnson, in an interview for Publishers Weekly by Rachel Deahl (2012: 8).

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urgent issues in the 21^st century, to a series of fiction books also by foreign writers,¹⁸⁷ to cookbooks. As Melville is an independent publisher, the founders Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians are free to decide which books to translate and publish according to their personal tastes.¹⁸⁸

The translator Antony Shugaar is a writer, translator, and journalist. He perfected his skills as a translator from Italian while working in the 1980s for Franco Maria Ricci and his art magazine FMR in Milan, under the guidance of William Weaver.¹⁸⁹ His career as a professional translator started shortly after, specialising in translations from Italian 20^th-21^st century authors.¹⁹⁰ His deep knowledge of Italian culture and language is attested by his translations dedicated to social issues (the mafia and the holocaust in Italy), literature and politics (Niccolò Machiavelli’s works and life), key judicial cases in the late 20^th century (the Calabresi murder in 1972). Among Shugaar’s translations there are no books for children, and Gianni Rodari’s Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto seems to be a special case. According to Kelly Burdick¹⁹¹, who edited Lamberto Lamberto

187 Nonfiction books include translations from authors like Bernard-Henry Lévy (French), Giancarlo Bonini and Giuseppe d’Avanzo (Italian); fiction books span from German authors (Hans Fallada, Irmgard Keun) to the Hungarian Nobel prize Imre Kertész, to French authors (Jean Christophe Valtat, Benoit Duteurtre). Among children’s books it is worth mentioning the 2010 edition of The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Mahendra Singh.

188 Interview for Publishers Weekly (Deahl, 2012: 8).

189 Weaver (1923-2013) was a well-known translator from Italian who worked on the translation of Il nome della rosa by Umberto Eco in 1983. This translation, together with other translations of Eco’s books, was often quoted by Eco in Dire quasi la stessa cosa: esperienze di traduzione (2003) to show how a skilled translator is able to negotiate meaning with the original author to produce a linguistically and semantically rich text in the target language. Weaver also translated other Italian 20^th century writers such as Giorgio Bassani, Italo Calvino, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luigi Pirandello, and Italo Svevo.

190 Among the most famous are Giorgio Faletti (2012), Stefano Benni (2006, 2008), Diego De Silva (2012), Carlo Levi (2005), and Gianrico Carofiglio (2011). Carofiglio had already been translated in English by Patrick Creagh with Involuntary Witness (2005): the rich vocabulary of legal terms in the book was recently studied in terms of domesticating or foreignising strategies in a paper by Gianluca Pontrandolfo (2012).

191 Interview released to Publishing the World in 2012 and available online at:

https://publishingtheworld.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/5-questions-with-kelly-burdick/ (last access 08/09/2015)

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Lamberto for Melville House, it was Shugaar who suggested Rodari’s book for translation into English.¹⁹² As editor, Burdick asked for a sample from the book, to decide whether it was worth going ahead with the project, and Shugaar succeeded in having Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto published in 2011. Therefore the initiator of the whole process was the translator, who was aware of the limited number of translations of Rodari’s works in the US and found the right publisher who could support his idea.

The peritextual material for Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto shows the importance of the figure of the translator. Shugaar’s name does not appear on the book jacket, but on the inside cover of the book together with that of the illustrator, Federico Maggioni.¹⁹³ A short biography for Shugaar is present on the back jacket cover, where he is described as

“an author and translator” of authors like Paolo Sorrentino, Nanni Balestrini and Massimo Carlotto. It appears under Gianni Rodari’s biography, emphasised in bold:

Gianni Rodari (October 23, 1920 – April 14, 1980) was an Italian writer and journalist, most famous for his books for children. The recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1970, Rodari is a household name among educators and parents, not to mention children, he is already considered by many literary historians to be Italy’s most important writer of children’s literature in the twentieth century. Influenced by French surrealism and linguistics, Rodari advocated poetry and language play as a way to recover the rhythm and sound of oral tradition and nursery rhymes. He is the author of The Grammar of Fantasy, a classic manual for teachers, as well as many books for children.

192 More specifically, Burdick states in the same interview that Shugaar is “a great champion of Rodari and thought it was a major oversight that the book had not been published in English.” (Publishing the World, 2012).

193 Maggioni is an Italian illustrator famous worldwide. The illustrations for the US edition of C’era due volte il barone Lamberto are the same of one of the Italian editions of the novel, published by Einaudi Ragazzi in 1992.

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This biography is extremely precise in terms of birth/death dates, writing background and country of origin, literary influences, and references to other books available by the same author. There is no indication of other books by the same author published out of the US, and it can be said that whoever wrote this biography was acquainted with The Grammar of Fantasy. The section in bold in the text was taken from Zipes’s introduction to that book (commented in the present research in section 3.2.2), thus showing a link between the peritextual materials of The Grammar and Lamberto.

The front jacket flap presents the reader with the usual blurb, emphasised in bold:

A modern fable for children and adults: a story of life, death, and terrorism – in the grand tradition of Exùpery’s The Little Prince. […]

A hilarious and strangely moving tale that seems ripped from the headlines – although actually written during the time the Red Brigades were terrorizing Italy – Gianni Rodari’s Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto has become one of Italy’s most beloved fables. Never before translated into English, it’s a reminder, as Rodari writes, that “there are things that only happen in fairytales.”

The extracts in bold show the interest of the editor towards making Rodari familiar to the reader. First of all, the reference to The Little Prince links Rodari to a famous story deeply rooted in the American heritage of children’s literature, a book translated from French¹⁹⁴. Secondly, the reference to terrorism anticipates an event in the story that is actually the kidnapping of the Baron by a group of bandits, and the political reference to the Red Brigades takes for granted that the public has a previous knowledge of the historical situation in Italy at the end of the 1970s. The uniqueness of

194 The Little Prince became “one of the icons in children’s literature” (Lathey, 2010: 147). From the data of the survey carried out in Chapter 1, Saint Exupéry’s book appeared twice: in the UK in a translation from 1974 by unknown and in the US in 1994 translated by Katharine Woods for its 50^th Anniversary Edition. The case of The Little Prince is special because it was originally written and distributed in the US; it reached the home country of the writer (France) later on to enjoy an equal success in the two countries (Beckett & Nikolajeva, 2006: vii).

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this translation is emphasised by the fact that the book had “never before [been]

translated into English”, and it justifies the quotations on the front and back cover of Lamberto by Italo Calvino, praising Rodari’s imaginative and inspired writing style¹⁹⁵.

The epitextual material for Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto spans from interviews (e.g. with Kelly Burdick¹⁹⁶), literary blogs¹⁹⁷, specialised online magazines¹⁹⁸. There are several elements that resurface from these sources related to the original context (both geographical and literary) of Rodari’s books or his assimilation to the target culture, and the recognition of the presence of the translator. First, the presence of references to the Italian historical context where Rodari wrote the novel is worth considering. The book blurb served as a starting point for some reviews to discuss the historical period of the Red Brigades, more specifically the murder of the politician Aldo Moro. Booklover review even mentioned a link with the Colombian M19 movement that may have been more familiar to the target public than the Red Brigades.¹⁹⁹ The assassination of Moro appears several times (in Shelf Awareness, Flavorwire, New York Journal of Books) possibly because of the coincident date of the event with Rodari’s book release in Italy (1978). Second, the reviews present a more or less detailed biography of Rodari based sometimes on the information given on the Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto book jacket, and sometimes expand on Rodari’s life and works with a mention also of his militancy

195 Italo Calvino is not only a famous writer and critic in Italy, but he is also well-known in the US especially for his Six Memos for the Next Millennium translated by Patrick Creagh in 1988, which were written before Calvino’s death as he was preparing for a series of lectures in the US. Therefore Calvino represents a contact point between the Italian and the American culture, possibly familiar to both adult publics.

196 In Publishing the World, 2012.

197 James Guida (2012), The Lit Pub (Gibert, 2011), Fiction Advocate (Gasbarra, 2011), Booklover (2012), Flavorwire (Temple, 2011), Barnes&Noble (Mustich, 2011).

198 Shelf Awareness (DiMartino, 2011), New York Journal of Books (Floyd Durante, 2011), The Complete Review (Orthofer, 2011).

199 This reference was taken from Melville House’s book catalogue for 2011, which says that Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto is “based on the true-life terrorism of the Colombian M19 movement and the Red Brigades’ kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro […] an adroit, witty, and poignant reflection on what happens when terrorism strikes.” (Melville House Publishing, 2011: 12) Actually, this is not the kind of reflection that Rodari invited, but rather a ‘sensational’ interpretation of the reviewer.

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in the Communist Party²⁰⁰. Third, some reviews compared Rodari’s writing with authors familiar to the target public of English-speaking readers, primarily to Roald Dahl who is mentioned in five reviews as being the closest equivalent to Rodari in his writing. Other authors included Saint Exupéry (as mentioned in the blurb), Maurice Sendak, William Steig, the Marx Brothers (for the “sense of comedy”), Norton Juster, and Dr. Seuss²⁰¹. Fourth, the references to the book as a translation from Italian and to the translator. Two reviews indicate that Lamberto is the first English translation of the original Italian novel (Flavorwire, The New York Journal of Books), another mentions the original title C’era due volte il barone Lamberto translated as Twice Upon a Time there was Baron Lamberto (Guida, 2012). Shugaar’s translation is “impressive”,

“sprightly and faithful”, “deft” especially for his ability to translate play on words, idioms and play on numbers. Shugaar’s name appears in five reviews out of ten, although all reviews state that Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto is a translation.

Finally, the reviews analysed here may refer to other English translations of Rodari’s works. The receptive context is seen by reviewers as lacking previous works by Gianni Rodari in English: “After finishing Lamberto, I was hungry to find some of Rodari’s other works, but I learned of only one other, hard-to-find title in English”

(Guida, 2012), namely The Grammar of Fantasy translated by Zipes. Others recognised that Rodari is “mostly unknown in the States”, or that “few of [his] books have appeared in the U.S.”, without any reference to the Rodari’s works already published for the UK public between 1963 and 1976.

This overview of the paratextual material that surrounded Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto shows the influence that the peritextual sources had on epitextual sources.

The epitextual sources suggest a positive acceptance of the book by the American

200 In this sense, the most precise review is the one by James Guida, who indicated that Rodari “joined the Resistance and became a Communist Party member”, and remained “a Communist until the revelations about Stalin surfaced”.

201 The latter is not new, it was also mentioned in Del Giudice’s review for The Grammar of Fantasy in section 3.2.2 of the present research.

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public, in consideration of the large number of reviews (aimed at lay and/or specialised readers) it received from different magazines.

Section 3.3 analyses other epitextual sources aimed at the specialised public to show how the image of Rodari was outlined for the English-speaking public.